


Title IX

by Rosie J (darthmelyanna)



Series: Pride and Penalty Kicks [3]
Category: Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-05-13 08:20:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19247389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darthmelyanna/pseuds/Rosie%20J
Summary: The Darcy family heads for France for the Women's World Cup.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It feels like it’s been a full nine years since I wrote the first two fics in this series. As it happens, it’s only been five, but I was so convinced that it was nine that I started writing the fairly elaborate subplot of this story well before realizing my mistake. Correcting it would have required an entirely new subplot for reasons which I think will be obvious, so I ask instead that you accept this glaring continuity error as a charming foible on the part of your author. Or that you assume that Lizzy and Darcy spent some time traveling faster than the speed of light and thus aged four extra years, along with their family. Sport before continuity, friends. Enjoy.

Will Darcy was always a man with a plan. Granted, very little of his life actually went to plan, so it really shouldn’t have surprised him so often when his well-ordered schemes went pear-shaped. But he’d always assumed that if and when he had kids, those kids would play football.

He and Elizabeth had three children now. So far only their son had taken up his parents’ game. And he was only five, so who knew where he’d end up.

“Why is our daughter so bedazzled?” Will asked of his wife, while balancing their six-month-old on his knee and trying to keep her from chucking her teething ring across the gym.

“It’s the style,” Lizzy said with a shrug. “And I like it. Ella likes it.”

“Can you imagine footballers with that much bling?”

“Oh, like the men wouldn’t use sparkles for the stars on their crests if they thought of it?”

“I—I—all right, that’s fair.”

Across the gym, eight-year-old Ella Darcy raised her sparkle-covered right arm to salute the judges—lately she’d developed what Will considered a regrettable fascination with Russian gymnasts, hence the one-armed salute. “Brendan,” he said to his son, “put the phone down. Your sister’s up.”

Brendan grumbled about it but shut the phone off. “Is she going to fall again?” he asked.

“Be nice,” said Lizzy. “She only did that once last time.”

“Yeah, but it was really funny! She was all like…” He sprawled his arms and legs out as though lying on the ground, making a weird face while he was at it.

“Come on, Brendan,” Will said. “Watch your sister.”

Ella had by then pushed up on the beam and swung one leg over it to mount the apparatus. Then with a flourish of the arms, she raised up from the straddle to bring one knee onto the beam, and from there stood, back leg extended over the end. She swung the back leg forward, tapping the beam with her toes before actually stepping. Then, with just a moment’s hesitation, she stepped again into a front walkover. Will had to keep himself from cheering too loudly when she made it safely onto her hands and back to her feet. That was where she fell last time.

She turned on her toes, arms outstretched, then did a few poses with knees bent. Then she lifted her leg high in front and swung it back as far as she could, her back arched. Two high-kicking steps brought her back to the middle of the beam, where she did a split leap. A second before the fateful jump, Lizzy had slapped her hand over her eyes. “You can look now,” he said. “She survived it.”

Lizzy lowered her hand in time to see Ella do a half turn on one foot. Then Ella leaned over again, holding a handstand for a moment before dropping off the side to dismount.

The three Darcys in the stands who were old enough to applaud did so, cheering enough to embarrass Ella. Baby Morgan took that moment to try throwing her teething ring again, but she threw in Lizzy’s direction. Lizzy, still a goalkeeper at heart, caught it before it could fly into Mrs. Jimenez’s hair.

“Nice catch, sweetheart,” Will said.

“Bad defense, babe,” she replied.

“If you’d wanted defense, you should have married a defenseman.”

* * *

Ella came away from the meet with three medals, one in each color. Her beam routine had taken silver, her floor routine had taken bronze, and she’d won gold on uneven bars. Lizzy hugged her daughter tightly. “You did great, Ella!”

“My vault could have been better,” Ella replied, sighing.

“And it will be,” Will said, patting her shoulder. “It takes time. You know that.”

“Did you say goodbye to your friends?” Lizzy asked. “You’re not going to see them for a month.”

“Yeah, I did. When do we go to the airport?”

“As soon as you take your leotard to Mrs. Copeland and thank her profusely for washing it for you.”

“Yes, Mom.” She got a couple steps away before turning back again. “Wait, what does ‘profusely’ mean?”

Vocabulary lesson aside, the last directive was soon completed, and the Darcys headed for their car and thence to the airport. While they were waiting at a red light, Lizzy glanced back at the kids. Ella and Brendan both had headphones on, and Morgan had already nodded off. “Are we really sure we want to take them to France for a month?” she asked.

“We took two of them to Russia for a month last year,” Will said, “and you were pregnant too. We managed, even if Ella did wind up obsessed with Soviet gymnasts.”

“That was going to happen anyway. I think it was mostly YouTube’s fault.” Lizzy sighed. “It’s just a lot.”

Will laid his hand over hers. “It’s all right. Jane’s meeting us at the airport, and Georgiana will be at the hotel in France. It’s this or we don’t see them for a month.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” The light turned green, and Will made the left turn toward the airport. “It’s a month in Paris. What could go wrong?”

He sighed. “Don’t you know better than to tempt fate?”

* * *

When they landed in Paris, Morgan was really the only one alert enough or happy enough to greet France with a smile. A ticketing snafu had put Ella six rows ahead of the rest of the family, and only Jane’s management of the situation had got to get the man next to Ella to swap seats. Silently grateful, Will determined to upgrade his sister-in-law to first class for the trip home.

“Did she talk about anything other than gymnastics?” he asked Jane as they waited for luggage. Ella was a few feet away, leaning on her mother.

“She gave me a blow-by-blow account of her friend Christine’s pool party and then conked out just past Newfoundland,” Jane said, with an amused look. “I know you’ve been worried about gymnastics taking over her life, but she really is a well-rounded kid. I’ve got patients who barely put Pokémon Go away during exams.”

“That’s what you get for having your office next to the best Pokémon gym in town, though.”

“Fair enough. But I really think she’s fine. She does well in school, she has lots of friends, she’s looking forward to getting whatever you get in Pokémon Go here in France, and she also wants to be a world-class gymnast from a country that no longer exists.”

Will sighed heavily at that. “We never should have taken her to Russia last year.”

Jane elbowed him lightly. “You know she wants to do all the skills named after Nellie Kim in a competition, right?”

“Please don’t mention Nadia Comaneci around her.”

She smiled a little and stepped forward, as her luggage had appeared. The rest of the Darcys’ bags weren’t far behind. Soon they were loading everything into the back of a van and getting in for the ride to the hotel. They’d left New York around six in the evening and got to their Paris hotel at nearly nine in the morning, local time. Morgan was maybe the only one who’d slept adequately on the plane ride, and unfortunately she was not one of the people who had meetings to attend.

Of course, she came to the studio that afternoon anyway. Will and Lizzy took all three kids with them. Most of their colleagues had met Ella and Brendan at last year’s World Cup, but of course hardly anyone at CSTV had known last year in Moscow that they were expecting again.

They walked into the main studio, looking out onto the Eiffel Tower, and the crowd in the room was buzzing. “Lizzy Bennet!” Meg Gardiner cried upon seeing them. “You look like you haven’t slept in a year.”

Lizzy turned to Will. “That’s where we’ve been going wrong, babe. We thought we were only supposed to sleep every other year.”

“Mom,” Ella said, in the tone of a child utterly disgusted, “she was _joking_.”

“She was,” said Ed Gardiner, coming up behind them. “How are you, Ella-belle? I think you’ve grown eight inches since last year.” She held up four fingers. “Oh, is it only four inches?”

“Coach Harper says four’s enough.”

“Well, your coach may be right.” He looked up at Will and Morgan before chuckling. “Wow, the baby really does look exactly like you.”

“I make a pretty girl, it turns out,” Will said dryly.

“You do!”

Meg and Lizzy were already drifting off to talk to others, Ella and Brendan in tow. Will turned to introduce Jane. “Jane, have you met Ed Gardiner?”

“I think so, probably at Lizzy’s first Olympics.” Jane put her phone away and shook Ed’s hand. “Good to see you again, Coach.”

“You too, Jane,” he replied. “You’re the doctor, right?”

“One of. Our sister Mary is a doctor too.”

“Ah, right, the Bennet family overachievers.”

Jane laughed a little. “Maybe. Lizzy always has said she wound up a world champion by accident.”

Will looked over at his wife, who kept her Olympic gold medals in a shoebox in a closet. Most people were shocked when they learned how she kept them. She’d stuck with football because it seemed like a good way to get a scholarship for college. The career—both careers—that followed were happy accidents.

They were chatting about further summer plans when Chuck Bingley came up behind Jane. “Darcy! I didn’t know you’d landed yet,” he said.

“Good to see you, man,” Will said, offering a handshake. “You haven’t met my daughter Morgan yet, have you? Or Lizzy’s sister?”

Bingley made a face of exaggerated delight at Morgan before turning to Jane. He seemed almost startled by her—not an uncommon reaction. Jane was, after all, an uncommon beauty. She smiled sweetly. “Jane, this is Chuck Bingley,” Will said quietly. “Chuck, Dr. Jane Bennet.”

“Doctor?” he repeated. “You’re not an ortho doctor, are you? I keep meaning to ask someone about my shoulder problem.”

Jane laughed. “Sorry, I’m a pediatrician.”

“Yes, and you played football, Bingley,” Will interjected. “How much damage did you do to your shoulder in a game with no hands?”

Bingley looked a little embarrassed; he’d been a little obvious about coming up with a reason to continue the conversation with her. “You a big soccer fan?” he asked, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Oh, I played some in high school. Not like Lizzy, though,” she replied. “But I’m mostly here to help out with the kids. Same with Will’s sister.”

“They need two babysitters, Darcy?” Chuck asked.

“Ella can’t take a month off from training, so we made arrangements with a gym here to let her come in a few days a week,” Will said. “And I wouldn’t ask anyone to take Brendan and Morgan along to a gym for that many hours.”

“Good for Ella, I guess,” Chuck replied. He looked at Jane and smiled, almost nervously. “Well, if Darcy and Lizzy let you out of babysitting and you want to go sightseeing…”

Will had seen this play out before. Jane could have made a second career out of gently letting guys down (although sometimes she had to get more forceful). He expected to see her do the same now. To his surprise, she smiled at Bingley. “Yeah,” she said, “that’d be nice.”

Chuck smiled a bit foolishly, but he was called away before either could say much more. Will turned to his sister-in-law with a smile. “That’d be nice?”

“Is there something I should know about him?”

Will shrugged. “He has a bit of a reputation as a ladies’ man, but I suppose that’s not quite fair. He’s a serial monogamist, as far as I know.”

“Just a long series?” Jane asked.

“Not unlike you.” He looked across the room to see Chuck giving a high five to a woman from the camera crew who was walking by him. “He played a couple years in Manchester before ending up in the Bundesliga. I’ve never heard anything bad about him out of Germany either.”

“Is he a good guy?”

“I always thought so.”

“Well, your good opinion is enough to recommend at least a first date.”

“I’m flattered.”

“You should be.” Jane held her hands out to Morgan, who practically lurched toward her aunt. “It looks like things are getting ready to start here. Georgiana and I will get the kids and take them for lunch.”

“Where are you going to go?”

“I’d like to think some nice little bistro.”

“You’re taking Brendan, so I’m imagining McDonald’s.”

“Yeah, so am I.”

Not long after Jane and Georgiana left with the kids, the meeting started. It was mostly a matter of introductions and last-minute schedule changes. One of the color commentators had been put on bedrest three days before she was supposed to fly to France, so her matches were being split up among other former players at the tournament. Lizzy was taking one of them, the first semifinal in Lyon. With any luck the Americans would be playing in that game.

“Well, that’s exciting,” she said as they left the meeting to find their studio.

“Who’ll be your partner?”

“Holly Ogden.”

“Oh, she’s fantastic.”

“I know. I’m happy I’ll be with her.”

They turned a corner, and their studio space was suddenly before them. It wasn’t as tiny as the one in Rio or as musty as the one in Moscow. Instead, it was a sea of beige, from the carpet to the furniture to the ceiling.

“They say taupe is very soothing,” Lizzy said as they entered.

“You’ve seen that movie too many times,” Will replied, setting his bag down. “It all looks right—camera, computer, headsets.”

Lizzy pulled a chair out and squatted down to look under the table. “We have a cord management nightmare down here, which makes us… four for four?”

Will leaned over to look. “Four for four. It looks better than last year, though.”

“I’ll see if we can get a tech to come straighten it out.”

“As long as it’s not the _Game of Thrones_ guy. What _was_ his name?”

* * *

Bill Collins was his name, and while he still talked a lot about _Game of Thrones_ , it was with the fervor of a fan bitterly disappointed. “They did Dany wrong,” he said at the height of his rant, “and they threw away years of character development for Jaime. Complete waste. Complete waste.”

He did, however, straighten out their cord management nightmare to everyone’s liking, so it was worth sitting through the rant. The previous year they had waited until landing in Moscow to record the group stage previews and wound up yawning their way through them. They’d learned their lesson about jet lag and opted to record those at home, so now they just had to do a quick arrival video.

“Hey, everyone!” Lizzy said, smiling into the camera. “I’m Lizzy Bennet and he’s Will Darcy. Welcome to a windowless room in Paris!”

“Over the next month we’ll be bringing you the finest in football as the Women’s World Cup plays out here in France,” Will said. “Our group stage analysis videos are online, so check them out if you haven’t already. And you can send us questions and nominate pictures for our studio here by tweeting us, with the hashtag #OTPinFrance or @LizzyBennetGK or @DarcyStriker.”

“This really should be an excellent World Cup,” said Lizzy. “A top-notch, veteran American team, a French team that’s hungry for a win on home soil, and all the unpredictability that comes with soccer.”

“Football.”

Lizzy kept her gaze on the camera lens and mouthed, “Soccer.”

With that Will turned the camera off, stood, and yawned. “Let’s get something to eat,” he said, “and then make sure our kids haven’t traumatized either of our sisters.”

Back at the hotel, they found Jane and Georgiana both asleep in the suite’s living room, while Ella and Brendan knelt at a coffee table, scribbling away. Lizzy had a heart-in-throat moment of fear that they were destroying furniture with markers, but they had gotten a hold of some kind of poster paper. “Mom! Dad!” they whispered together.

Lizzy went to Brendan’s side while Will joined Ella. The pair were drawing the view of Paris from the big window in front of them. Ella was working on a very respectable Eiffel Tower on the right side of the poster, and probably together they had drawn low buildings around it. But on the left, Brendan had used his imagination.

“Is that Godzilla?” Will asked.

“Yeah!” said Brendan. “He’s going to kick a soccer ball over the tower once Ella finishes it.”

“You know this is the Women’s World Cup, right?” Lizzy asked.

“Oh, yeah. Then _she’s_ going to. It’s a girl Godzilla.”

Lizzy ruffled her son’s hair while he contemplated his next marker choice. “Well, when you’re finished, we’re definitely hanging this up in the studio. But for now I think your dad and I are going to take a nap. Try not to wake your aunts.”

Will put his arm around her and led her into their bedroom, where a sleeping baby and a bed of their own awaited.

* * *

That evening, Lizzy was to tape a segment for the network with some other former players, so Will took Ella and Georgiana to the gym where Ella would be training. The French national championship was coming up the next weekend, so the elites were hard at work. Young women were flying over the vault and the floor. On the uneven bars, coaches were spotting gymnasts while they practiced release moves, and across from them women worked their way through acrobatics down the length of high beams.

Ella was a girl enthralled. Her gym at home had plenty of older girls and even a few elites, but she’d never spent much time around professional gymnasts preparing for a national championship.

A small woman with grey hair in a pixie cut came up to them. “I think you are Monsieur Darcy?” she said. “Camille Garnier.”

“Yes, hello,” he said, offering a handshake. “Will Darcy. This is my sister, Georgiana, and my daughter Ella. Georgiana’s going to be bringing Ella most days.”

“So good to meet you,” the coach said, shaking his hand, Georgiana’s, and then Ella’s. “We are a little busy today getting ready for nationals, but let’s have you warm up and see what you do, yes?”

Ella looked up at Will. “Go. Go have fun,” he said quietly.

Will and his sister moved to the bleachers along one side of the gym and settled in for the practice. Georgiana watched the women working out with some awe. “How do they do that?” she asked.

“I used to be very impressed with myself when I did a bicycle kick,” he replied. “I think I’d dislocate half the joints in my body if I tried any of this.”

“I can’t even do the splits anymore.”

“You might be able to if your jeans weren’t painted on.”

“Don’t you remember the pact we made when I was fourteen? No fashion criticism unless you bought the clothes for me.”

Meanwhile Ella did her warmup, and Coach Garnier brought her over to the tumble track near the bleachers. “This is just to see what you can do,” she said. “If I ask you to do something and you’re not ready for it, you say so.”

“Yes, Coach,” Ella said, with a determined look on her face.

She started with a string of back handsprings down the bouncy mat, and Georgiana shook her head. “She may look like Lizzy, but my goodness, that was your face she just made right there.”

“What do you mean, my face?”

“That serious look you’d get right before you made a shot that was physically impossible.”

“I do not have that look.”

“You do! And you taught it to your daughter!”

By the end of ninety minutes, Ella had done tumbling passes, fragments of routines on a low beam, a few vaults, and a significant amount of work on uneven bars. Will knew from how her coaches at home talked that she was particularly good for her age on bars. Coach Garnier seemed to enjoy pushing her to see what she could do there. Ella went plummeting into the pit of foam blocks under the bars several times, but usually came up laughing.

Will was also willing to accept by the end of the session that his sister was right. Ella did indeed make a facial expression eerily similar to one of his. Georgiana had certainly dug up enough pictures of him making it to prove her point.

Of the many negative aspects of a life of moderate fame, losing arguments to his sister like this was one of the worst.

“Your daughter is a hard worker, Mr. Darcy,” Coach Garnier said while Ella cooled down. “Talented too. I see why the American federation selected her for—what’s it called? TOPs. I think she will get some good out of training here this month. We have nationals and European Games and Universiade and Junior Worlds and a meet here all coming up, and athletes training for each of them. It will be good for her to see how they train.”

On the way back to the hotel, Will asked Ella what she thought of the gym and the coach. “I like it,” she said. “And I like her. But I think I need to learn French.”

Will smiled. “Maybe Aunt Georgiana can teach you some.”

“Only if you don’t mind it sounding an awful lot like German,” Georgiana commented.

“I thought you spoke French!”

“German.”

“Ella, how do you feel about German?”

“Like it’d be more helpful in Germany,” Ella deadpanned.

That was fair, Will thought.

* * *

There were always surprises in soccer. The game defied the kind of data-driven analysis that some tried to bring to the table. A group of phenomenal individuals could make up a terrible side. Lizzy had been a once-in-a-generation goalie, but she knew very well that her defensive skills were only a part of her old team’s success. A team that couldn’t hold on to the ball and score wasn’t going to win, and that was more complicated than any algorithms produced thus far.

Japan—a former World Cup winner—was held to a scoreless draw by Argentina, generally considered one of the weakest teams in the tournament. South Africa faced a solid Spain without flinching. They’d clearly studied their opponent. And then the US played Thailand.

It wasn’t a fair game. It was never going to be a fair game. Such was the nature of the tournament. But as the score ticked up and up, Lizzy knew where this was going, and not even her husband managed to avoid saying it.

“You know,” he said, sounding uneasy, “they were already up by eight. Did she really have to celebrate that much?”

“Oh, please,” she snapped. “You once ripped your shirt off after scoring even though it was _snowing_. Don’t tell me you made a considered choice to celebrate a goal. You’d take your shirt off now if you were in her position.”

“Yeah, but—”

Lizzy fixed him with a look. “Do you really want to have this argument?”

The tenth goal went in a few minutes later. Will opened his mouth but Lizzy cut him off. “You’d have your shirt off.”

For the next three goals, she just said, “Shirt!”

The win—the staggering, record-breaking win—was completely overshadowed by the discussion of _how_ the women won. “I’m tired of it, to be honest,” Lizzy said later that day when they taped their show. “I’m tired of women being told they have to be ladylike. I’m tired of women being told they have to be humble or kind. I’m tired of women being expected to apologize for being good at what they do. Nobody told Germany to let up when they were crushing Brazil back in 2014. These women are suing their federation over the wage gap between them and the men, as they break a _men’s_ record here. They played this way because it matters. They celebrated their goals because scoring in a World Cup matters.

“Right now, Ada Hegerberg, the highest-paid woman in soccer, will not play for her national team because Norway doesn’t invest in its women’s team the way it does their men’s team, and she was branded a troublemaker for saying it. US women’s soccer is maybe the most dominant national program the US has ever produced, and instead of saying let’s pay them what they’re worth, we’re talking about feelings getting hurt.”

“Which is not to say you can’t feel for Thailand at the same time,” Will said, a bit cautiously. “Our daughter refused to watch after about three goals because she can’t stand games like that. But the US women’s team played the game which they have turned into an art form, and the discussion has turned from their phenomenal skill to something rather ugly instead.”

“And we’ve had enough of that in sports,” Lizzy replied. “We don’t need to create more reasons for outrage.”

* * *

Will, for reasons they left unexplained during the episode, was not wearing a shirt as they discussed this rather weighty matter. It quickly became the most viewed episode in the show’s history.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The podcast in this chapter is very much modeled after GymCastic, which I highly recommend for anyone interested in learning more about the sport.
> 
> And a warning: This chapter includes a discussion of sexual abuse. It is NOT a discussion of specific acts of abuse, but rather about the organizational failures that allowed predators like Larry Nassar and Barry Bennell to perpetrate their crimes for so long. If this subject is upsetting to you, please feel free to skip the scene. It is the final section of the chapter, starting with Lizzy being interviewed.

**Ashley Hopkins hasn’t packed yet** @FlicFlacFlop: @LizzyBennetGK you’re in France for that soccer tourney, right? @RyanChoScenario and I will be in Europe for allll the meets! Maybe we could buy you a cup of coffee while we’re there?

 **Legendary Goalkeeper Lizzy Bennet** @LizzyBennetGK: The firstborn would never forgive me if I passed up meeting the hosts of @TheFlipCast. #GymMomProblems

 **Ryan Cho wants to nap** @RyanChoScenario: The firstborn is wise.

 **Will Darcy, jet lag edition** @DarcyStriker: Correction: the firstborn is eight.

 **Ashley Hopkins hasn’t packed yet** @FlicFlacFlop: uhhhh I also just figured out what the GK in your twitter handle means......

 **Legendary Goalkeeper Lizzy Bennet** @LizzyBennetGK: I’ll teach you some terms when we meet.

* * *

Ashley Hopkins and Ryan Cho were the hosts of a popular gymnastics podcast, The Flip Cast. They had a knack for making even the most technical discussions of the sport highly entertaining. Ella had gotten both her parents listening to it, which had probably helped them understand gymnastics even faster than the YouTube videos she was constantly showing them.

Lizzy had gotten to know Ashley in particular via Twitter when she had questions about Ella’s conditioning requirements for the fast-track gymnastics program. Ashley was a former NCAA gymnast, and her cohost Ryan was a gymnastics enthusiast with a phenomenal memory for athletes and skills (and opinions on all of it). Their banter was less argumentative than the _Off the Pitch_ style, but it was charming and inviting to new fans without boring lifelong ones. And most impressively, they managed to eschew all partisanship. They were both Americans but they were first and foremost fans of beautiful gymnastics.

Ella found out about Lizzy’s opportunity to meet Ashley and Ryan when she was poking around the Twitter app on Will’s phone in the hotel suite, the night before the last games of the group stage. She squealed so loud that Morgan started crying. “Ella!” Will scolded.

“I’m sorry!” she said. “But Mom’s going to meet _Ashley and Ryan!_ ”

Will had by then picked up Morgan and started bouncing her around to calm her. Lizzy held out the baby’s stuffed bunny, which Morgan grabbed and smushed her face into. “That’s no reason to scream,” Will said to Ella.

“Who are Ashley and Ryan?” Georgiana asked.

Will and Lizzy both tried to answer, but Ella beat them to it. “They’re from The Flip Cast!” she said. “They’re the _best_ , and their podcast is the best, and Mom is going to meet them and that makes _her_ the best!”

“We need to work on your vocabulary, Ella,” said Jane.

“But they’re the best, Aunt Jane,” Ella said in all seriousness. “The _best_.” Then she spun around to Lizzy. “Mom, can I go with you to meet them?” she asked. “Please oh please oh please?”

She dragged out the last word so long that Lizzy was tempted to tell her yes just to get her to stop. “Ella,” she said sternly, “first you’re going to pick all your clothes up, because I saw what your half of your room looks like. Then you’re going to do your Duolingo lesson, which you were supposed to do when you decided to go looking at Dad’s Twitter. Then you will get your clothes ready for workout tomorrow, and _then_ we will talk about whether it’s a good idea for you to meet Ashley and Ryan.”

Ella deflated some. “Yes, Mom.”

When Ella had left the room, Jane turned to Lizzy. “I’m impressed.”

Lizzy shrugged. “She’s a good kid. You just have to be firm with her.”

“Well, you didn’t learn that from our mother.”

“Mum wasn’t a disciplinarian, I take it?” Georgiana asked.

Lizzy decided to be diplomatic about it. “Our mother had five daughters in nine years,” she said. “I’ve had three children in eight years. I have far more sympathy for her now than I did when I moved out.”

“Was our mother?” Georgiana then asked of Will.

“A disciplinarian?” he said, sitting down at the table with Morgan. “No, not with you. You probably don’t remember, but when you were very small, she’d let you run all the way through the house and jump into Dad’s chair when he wasn’t home.”

“I’m sure you were just as bad.”

“Not really. They were more than ten years older when they had you. It was like they were different parents for you.”

“Hey, we could do that with Morgan,” Lizzy said. “We could be totally chill with her and make Ella and Brendan think we’ve lost our minds.”

“They already think that, darling, and it’s only going to get worse when they’re teenagers.”

By bedtime, Ella had cleaned up her stuff and her brother’s stuff, done three French lessons in Duolingo, and neatly laid out her regular clothes and workout clothes for the next day. She was her father’s daughter in many ways, going well beyond what was asked when she really, really wanted something. As she looked up at Lizzy, with her father’s anxiously hopeful expression, Lizzy sighed. “All right,” she said. “But before you get too excited, I’m going to ask Ashley and Ryan if it’s okay. If they say no, that’s that.”

Ella clasped her hands behind her back and bounced slightly. “Okay.”

Ella shouldn’t have been worried. The two podcast hosts thought the story was hilarious and seemed as eager to meet her as she was to meet them. So the next day, after the US beat Sweden and the group stage was over, Lizzy wrapped her show recording with Will and met Ashley and Ryan at the gym where Ella was training.

Ashley was a hugger, it turned out, while Ryan had a firm handshake and an eye roll for his cohost’s hugging. “You’ll have to excuse her,” he said. “She hasn’t calmed down since we got our credentials for the Olympics next year.”

“Eh, it’s exciting,” Lizzy said. She and Will hadn’t gone to the Rio Olympics but were credentialed for the Tokyo games. It was going to be a big trip for them, their first time covering the Olympics in person.

“Yeah, but we got credentialed six months ago,” Ryan pointed out.

Ashley shook her head. “Come on, let’s watch some gymnastics.”

Inside the gym, it was quieter than the previous times Lizzy had managed to come to her daughter’s practice. The European Games were starting that night in Minsk, and while the gymnastics competition didn’t begin for a week, the gymnasts participating in it were already in Belarus.

Lizzy led her guests—who’d had to ask permission of the gym to come in, since technically they were gymnastics press—to the bleachers where Georgiana was working on a laptop, which she closed when the three arrived. “Georgiana, this is Ashley Hopkins and Ryan Cho,” Lizzy said. “Guys, this is my sister-in-law, Georgiana Darcy.”

“Ah, my niece says you’re the best,” Georgiana said.

“So we heard!” Ashley said, laughing.

With so many seniors gone to Belarus, Ella had her choice of apparatus that day. She was on bars, which didn’t surprise Lizzy much. Ella loved swinging through the air and would work there until her hands wouldn’t hang on anymore if a coach would let her. “Look at her form!” Ashley said during a handstand. Ella’s legs were glued together, her toes as pointed as a ballerina’s, and her body perfectly straight and perpendicular to the low bar.

After what seemed like an incredible amount of time, she pivoted down, arms still holding herself up but her hips coming to rest at the bar. Then she pressed up into another handstand, and Ryan shook his head. “How unfair is it that an eight-year-old has better upper-body strength than I do?”

“Look, I was a professional athlete and she’s got better upper-body strength than I do,” Lizzy said.

“Yeah, but you played a game that’s all legs.”

“True. I can probably still beat her in leg presses.”

“That’s the spirit.”

The coach got her to come down from the handstand and she stood on the low bar for a moment before jumping to the high bar. Coach Garnier stood beside her while she hung, and soon she was arching her body forward and back. “What’s going on?” Georgiana asked.

“Oh, she’s working on tap swings,” Ashley said. “It’s how you get more speed for things like releases.”

“You’re going to need to explain that some more,” Lizzy said.

“The arch, hollow, arch, hollow thing she’s doing is to help build muscle memory. Changing the shape of the body like that builds momentum on giant circles—where you’re swinging all the way around the bar with your arms extended like that. There’s some pretty sophisticated kinetics in getting the bar to flex and not hitting the low bar and not peeling off the high bar. You arch the back, adjust the grip, all kinds of things.”

“Too much physics,” Georgiana said.

The other three laughed.

While Ella worked, Ashley and Ryan asked about the tournament, which Lizzy took to be polite inquiry rather than serious interest, until things took a turn into the US women’s national team’s lawsuit against their federation. Ryan was working on a dissertation on the history of protest in sport (which had landed him on CNN once to talk about Colin Kaepernick, despite him knowing absolutely nothing about American football), and he knew almost as much about the lawsuit as Lizzy did.

“I can put you in touch with some members of the US team if you want,” she offered. “Assuming you haven’t interviewed them already.”

“They may not be able to talk with litigation ongoing. I don’t suppose you have an in with Ada Hegerberg, though, do you?” he asked. “Her protest is really fascinating to me because Norway pays its male and female athletes equally. It’s all down to how the federation treats them otherwise. She’s become my white whale for my dissertation.”

“I’ll ask around, but don’t hold your breath.” Ella came down from the high bar to take a bit of a break, so Lizzy asked, “Can I be nosy and ask how you wound up with that as your subject?”

“I got interested in it in 2011,” he said. “The IOC was finally recognizing Sohn Kee-chung as Korean. He’d won the gold medal in the marathon at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, but it was while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. On the podium he stared at his feet while the Japanese anthem played. He tried to tell the reporters that he was Korean, not Japanese, but the Japanese interpreters with him wouldn’t translate that. A newspaper back in Seoul blurred out the Japanese flags on their uniforms—another Korean had won bronze—and the paper was shut down and some of its journalists were arrested and tortured for it.”

Lizzy and Georgiana’s jaws both dropped. “I had no idea,” Lizzy said.

“That kind of thing doesn’t make the fluff pieces at the Olympics,” Ryan pointed out. “Anyway, I’m Korean-American, obviously, and when word got out that the IOC was recognizing Sohn under his actual name and actual country of origin instead of Son Kitei of Japan, my grandmother cried a lot. He’d been dead for almost a decade by that point, but it mattered to a lot of people that Sohn Kee-chung was Korean. It got me interested in the political aspect of sports and how protests are performed in that sphere.”

“This is also how he got interested in gymnastics,” Ashley said.

“How’s that?” Georgiana asked.

“Věra Čáslavská,” he replied. “Czech gymnast at the 1968 Olympics, a couple months after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. She lost her training facility in the invasion and still won the all-around title. She would have swept the event finals if it hadn’t been for judging shenanigans and obvious political interference. During those medal ceremonies where the Soviet anthem was played, she looked down and away. And that act of protest ended her career.”

Lizzy sat for a minute, digesting it all as she watched Ella come their way. Odds were good that if Ella got as far as elite in gymnastics, she’d have to wrestle with such questions. American gymnastics didn’t have the same dynamics as women’s soccer in the US, but there were a lot of issues right now. There would surely be problems to probe and protest. Lizzy just hoped she could help her daughter prepare for it.

Ella was all smiles now, though. She ran over to the bleachers and waved to them. “Hi!” she said. “I’m Ella Darcy.”

Ryan and Ashley stood and leaned over to shake her hand. They hardly needed to introduce themselves but did so anyway. “What’d you think?” Ella asked them, bouncing a little.

“Those are some awesome drills,” Ashley said. “Just keep working on pulling your body in on the hollow position. The arch you’ve got down.”

Ella nodded, her eyes wide. “Well, I’m going to beam next. Any pointers?”

“Yeah, don’t fall off,” Ryan said.

Ella giggled before running off to the low beams.

“Well, she has no fear,” Ashley remarked.

Lizzy snorted. “Yeah, I think that’s literally the one trait she got from me.”

When Ella finished her beam drills, it was time to go. They were meeting Will and the younger kids for dinner; Jane was going out with Chuck Bingley, a subject about which Lizzy intended to question her thoroughly later. On the way to the restaurant, Ashley asked Ella what she thought of Coach Garnier. Ella hesitated before answering. “Is this on the record?”

Ashley laughed. “Oh, you are going to be so good at this when you make elite. No, we’re not on the record.”

“I like her,” Ella said, “but she always makes me say how I think I did before she’ll tell me how she thinks I did.”

“Good for her,” Ryan said.

“Why?”

“Because you need to be able to know you did a good job without having to look at your coach,” Ashley explained. “You have to have feedback from your coach because you can’t see what you look like, but eventually you should learn what it feels like to do a skill well and know it without needing your coach to validate you.”

“Oh.” Then Ella frowned. “Wait, what does ‘validate’ mean?”

At the restaurant, Lizzy introduced Ryan and Ashley to the rest of the family. Ashley gasped loudly at Morgan’s name. “Did you name her after Morgan Hurd?” she asked, her voice getting progressively higher.

That caught Lizzy off-guard. “You know, most people think we named her after Alex Morgan.”

Georgiana started. “I thought you did name her after Alex Morgan."

“Alex Morgan thought we named her after Alex Morgan,” Will pointed out.

“Honestly, we just liked the name,” Lizzy said. “Ella liked it because of Morgan Hurd and Brendan liked it because of something to do with Batman.”

“Iron Man!” Brendan corrected, indignant.

“Sorry, Brendan,” Lizzy said. “Something to do with Iron Man.”

* * *

Lizzy stayed up after the rest of the Darcys had gone to bed that night, partly because she could. There were no games the next day, and Morgan had been sleeping later than usual in the morning since they got to France. But her real reason was that Jane hadn’t come in yet and it had been a decade at least since they’d gotten to gab after one of them got home from a date.

Their mother thought it was strange that Lizzy was the one who’d gotten married and had kids first, but it didn’t surprise Lizzy that Jane was still single. Jane wanted to think well of the world (something even she admitted was getting harder and harder), but when it came to her heart, she was above all cautious. Lizzy had been fairly picky in her dating life, but not compared to Jane. Sometimes Lizzy wondered if her big sister was even interested in having a partner in the long run. She had a pretty full life. She had half a dozen nieces and nephews, plenty of friends, and a thriving pediatric practice in Boston, where her patients loved her and she had an excellent track record of sweetly convincing their parents to vaccinate.

Just before eleven, Jane came in as quietly as anyone could imagine. Lizzy heard a man’s soft voice in the hall just before the door closed. She didn’t try to make herself inconspicuous or pretend she hadn’t been waiting up for this exact purpose. “Well?” she prompted, once Jane closed the door.

“I had a good time,” Jane said, leaning back against the door. “And I’m a little annoyed at your husband for not setting me up with him years ago.”

Lizzy laughed quietly. “Well, Chuck lives in California and you live in Boston, so there’s that hiccup,” she said. “And Will isn’t allowed to set anybody up with anybody after he tried setting Chuck’s sister up with one of the executives at CSTV.”

“Didn’t end well?”

“Let’s just say we’re lucky that executive was already moving along to another network.”

Jane came over to sit on the couch, and Lizzy joined her. “I’m sure he’s not perfect,” Jane said, “but I want to maintain the illusion a little longer.”

“He is really nice,” Lizzy replied, “and I’ve heard he hates California. Just can’t make up his mind to move somewhere else.”

Jane shook her head. “You’re as bad as Mom.”

“Probably.” Lizzy would have continued the line of conversation, but then Jane yawned hugely. “Well, I’m the only mom in the room, so I’m telling you to go to bed,” she said. “I’m giving an interview in the morning, it turns out.”

“I thought you had tomorrow off.”

“Oh, it’s not for work. Just for fun.”

Jane was starting to push herself up when Lizzy said that, and it gave her pause. “That doesn’t sound like fun.”

“You haven’t met my interviewers.”

* * *

The next morning, Lizzy went to the studio, where she’d convinced a producer to let her borrow the _Off the Pitch_ studio for an unrelated recording. Ashley and Ryan brought their own audio recording equipment and spent a few minutes setting up computers and microphones. Lizzy yawned a lot through that process. After the fourth or fifth yawn, she said to herself, “Come on, Bennet, snap out of it.”

“Were you out partying last night?” Ryan asked, smiling at the absurdity of his question.

“I wish,” she replied. “Morgan decided to wake up every hour starting at midnight.”

“I can find you some coffee,” Ashley offered.

“Nah, let’s just do this. You can edit out the yawning, right?”

They sat down together at the table, Lizzy sitting across from the others. Ashley started the countdown as Lizzy stifled another yawn, and then they were recording.

“Hello, everyone!” Ashley began. “You’re listening to The Flip Cast! I’m Ashley Hopkins.”

“And I’m Ryan Cho,” Ryan said. “We’re here today to talk about the Asian Championships, the American Classic, the upcoming European Games, and the first-ever Junior Worlds. But first, we have a special guest with us today to talk with us about the depressing state of women’s sports.”

“Is that what I’m here for?” Lizzy asked.

“Shh! You’re not supposed to talk until I introduce you,” Ashley said, grinning. Lizzy knew from the style of the show that that would be left in the episode when they edited it. “We’re joined today by Elizabeth Bennet-Darcy, who is a two-time Olympic gold medalist—two-time? She’s nodding. Two-time Olympic gold medalist in one of those sports with balls, and cohost of CSTV’s _Off the Pitch_ , Lizzy Bennet.”

Lizzy had in fact started giggling well before her introduction was complete, as had Ryan. “One of those sports with balls!?” he repeated.

“Wait, I didn’t mean—hang on, a sport involving a ball!” Ashley corrected. “Not the other kind of balls. Geez, Ryan. You know, sport-ball. Women’s sport-ball.”

Ashley and Ryan’s dismissal of all sports involving people making contact with each other was becoming legendary among sports broadcasters and podcasters, so Lizzy was prepared for that, if not for the actual joke. “It’s okay,” she said. “My English husband and I are waging a proxy war through our kids as to whether it’s soccer or football. Sport-ball doesn’t sound that much worse.”

Ashley laughed. “Well, you and I met the way modern friends meet, on Twitter,” she said. “You were an NCAA player, an Olympic athlete, a World Cup winner, still a world-record holder for whatever it was you did on the field—”

“Blocking shots on goal with my face, mostly.”

“Right, no biggie,” Ashley said. “And of course you’re a soccer analyst now, with a very entertaining show you cohost with your very attractive husband. But your real accomplishment is that you’re a gym mom!”

“Yeah, my eight-year-old, Ella, is in her first year in TOPs, the Talent Opportunity Program. She’s actually training this month at a gym here in Paris because she couldn’t take a month off,” Lizzy said. “TOPs was how I met the gymternet. I tweeted about how the guidelines for TOPs testing sounded insane, and Ashley and many others told me why those tests are the way they are. You didn’t convince me that it’s not insane, but you did convince me that the conditioning is important for doing skills safely.”

“It is,” Ryan said, “but it’s also kind of wild that these girls, these _really young children_ , can do stuff like climb twelve feet up a rope with piked legs. I couldn’t do that at any point in my life.”

“I’m not sure I could ever do that either,” Lizzy admitted, “but Ella can.”

“How did you handle the pressure of the trials with her?” Ryan asked.

“Well, it was her first year of eligibility, so Will and I weren’t expecting her to make the cut. And we told her that. You know, it’s your first year, we know you’re going to try hard and do your best, but maybe this is going to be practice for next year.”

“That sounds shockingly healthy,” Ashley said.

“And we can’t have that,” Ryan finished.

Lizzy laughed a little, knowing the pair’s propensity to make jokes because, as they put it, it was either laugh or cry over a fifth of vodka. “It’s really been Will’s strategy,” she explained. “I know it sounds insane given where I wound up, but I was never plagued with ambition as a kid. I played soccer at first because I was good at it. I quit piano after three weeks because I couldn’t immediately play Beethoven or whatever.”

“She sounds like you, Ash.”

Ashley swatted his arm. “Shut up, Ry. Lizzy, I take it your husband was plagued by ambition?”

“Was?” she repeated with a slight smile. “Yeah, from what I understand he was a much better worker than me as a kid. But he told me that when he started trying out for stuff as a young athlete, his parents told him the same kind of thing. That it’s okay to fail.”

“Does your daughter believe you about that?” Ashley asked.

“So far. I hope she keeps believing us. I’ve read enough books by gymnasts to know that parents put a ton of time into their kids’ careers and it’s easy for both to lose sight of whose career it is.”

“Oh, let’s play a game!” Ashley said. “We name a book, you tell us the author.”

“Oh, no,” Lizzy replied. “I’m terrible with names. Ella, baby, don’t judge your mother too much for this when you’re listening, okay?”

“We’ll start easy. _Fierce._ ”

“Wow, you weren’t kidding. Aly Raisman.”

“Very good. Ryan, you got one?”

“ _It’s Not About Perfect,_ ” he said.

“Um, Mary Lou? I know she got a perfect 10 at least once. Wait, no, is that a ruse?”

Ryan laughed. “I’m not telling!”

“I’m going to try to stick the landing on this one. Mary Lou Retton.”

“Nope! You have toppled headlong off the beam, because that was Shannon Miller.”

“ _Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,_ ” Ashley said.

“Wait, that’s not a memoir!” Lizzy objected. “But I’ve read that one. Actually, I read it when I was still in college, I think. There’s not a ton of books out there specifically about women’s sports that aren’t kind of fluffy memoirs.”

“That’s fair,” said Ashley.

“Yeah, fluffy’s a good description for a lot of books, but not for that one,” Ryan said. “What did you think of it?”

“Horrifying. Horrifying. When Ella’s coaches told us they thought she was elite material, I immediately made my husband read it before we made a decision,” Lizzy said.

“And you two still agreed to let her test for TOPs?” Ryan asked, in a half-scandalized tone.

“I know. And this was maybe a couple months after Larry Nassar was sentenced and there were days of women making victim impact statements in court. But Ella was totally in love with the sport. She still is, obviously. And she’s really talented too. It’s hard to say no to your kid in that kind of situation. So you have to arm yourself as a parent. You have to make yourself knowledgable about the sport and its pitfalls. And when it comes down to it, the abuse that has come to light in gymnastics is awful but not unique to the sport.”

“Yeah, that’s one of the reasons Ryan and I retweet a lot of articles about abuse in other contexts,” Ashley said. “We live in this gymnastics bubble and it’s easy to think gymnastics is the only place where this kind of thing happens. It’s really, really not.”

“Exactly,” Lizzy replied. “There were some aspects to the gymnastics scandal that were probably unique to the sport, but the presence of predators in an environment filled with minors was not. Will and I have talked about this some on _Off the Pitch_ too. When was the _Indy Star_ report about Nassar published?”

“Right after the Rio Olympics, right?” Ryan said, looking to his cohost.

“Yeah, it was within a month,” said Ashley. “So, like, September 2016.”

“Yeah, so a couple months after that, in late 2016, in the UK a former professional footballer—and I’m going to use the British terms here, it’s just easier to keep straight that way—a former pro footballer went public with his story of sexual abuse when he was a kid. He’d been abused by Barry Bennell, a youth football coach,” Lizzy explained. “Bennell was known as a coach who could make you a professional footballer, and he preyed on these boys in the Premier League feeder system who wanted that more than anything.”

“Which is not unlike the stature Nassar had in the gymnastics community,” Ryan said. “Obviously he wasn’t a coach, but he was the doctor who treated the elites, and if this so-called ‘treatment’ helped Olympians get through injury and stay in competitive shape, and you wanted to be an Olympian, then you just kept your mouth shut and endured it.”

“Bennell was actually convicted in the US in the 90s,” Lizzy continued. “He was far from the only coach abusing boys—there’s been at least a dozen convicted, I think, and among them they had hundreds of victims. But Bennell is the one who stands out to me because the clubs he was associated with had gotten wind of his actions at different times and seemed to think the right thing to do was just move him elsewhere. And of course in that period, the FA—Football Association, sorry—was resisting attempts to set up a formal program to prevent abuse like this.”

“Yeah, basically what Ryan and I have learned because of the dumpster fire that is USA Gymnastics is that programs involving kids are going to attract predators. It’s up to those organizations to foster a culture that prevents predators from gaining opportunities,” Ashley said. “It’s well-documented that children often don’t report abuse. By the time the criminal abuse occurs, the abuser has groomed the child to accept whatever he does. He or she, I should say.”

“Right,” said Lizzy. “And ambitious kids can be vulnerable. This isn’t just about sexual abuse, either. It happens with all sorts of abusive behavior. When kids are really focused on a goal like making the Olympics or the NBA or getting a recording contract or whatever, they will obviously accept healthy coaching from good, positive coaches and mentors. But they will also very easily turn constant comments about weight into disordered eating. They’ll take physical and emotional abuse and think this is just part of what being a champion is. And to get back to _Little Girls in Pretty Boxes_ , it’s not like eating disorders and abusive coaching styles are restricted to gymnastics and figure skating. The pressure to lose weight by any means may manifest differently in other sports, but it’s there.”

“And abusive coaches?” Ryan asked.

“Yeah, I wound up changing my mind on what college I wanted to go to, because while I was visiting my original first choice, I saw the head coach screaming at an athlete until she cried. There was no scholarship in the world that was going to get me to be on his team.”

“It’s not just sports either,” Ashley said. “It happens in bands, it happens in church youth groups, it happens anywhere an organization fails to put in the effort to protect their kids.”

“Yep. I’m not an expert, but my husband and I have read a lot and talked to a lot of people in different circles. I’ve come to a couple conclusions. First, if somebody is trying to keep parents out of the room, they’re hiding something, whether it’s abusive tactics or grooming techniques. Second, a person who is overly concerned with the reputation of an organization is hiding someone’s sexual misconduct, whether his own or someone else’s.”

“So do you have any thoughts on how the athletes should handle the situation?” Ashley asked. “There’s a pretty big contingent among the survivors in gymnastics who think the whole organization ought to be burned to the ground.”

“Yeah, and I think I understand the logic,” Lizzy said. “USAG as an organization did tremendous harm through both direct action and inaction. I don’t really have an answer on whether it should continue to exist as the governing body for the sport in America. It’s a tough question and I’m not in a position to know the answer. But whether USAG remains an entity, certified as a governing body or not, the athletes need to unionize.”

“Yes!” Ashley said. “The minors would have to be represented by their parents, but as soon as you get your license to compete internationally, you need to have a voice at the table in the organization, something more powerful than the athlete reps on the board of the organization.”

“Right, and they’re the ones making the money,” Lizzy said. “The media likes to focus on the coaches because they’re around longer than the athletes—”

“And because some of the coaches have been insane,” Ryan interrupted.

“Well, yeah,” Lizzy continued. “But the athletes are the ones actually doing the work and making the money for the sport. They should be the ones holding the power here, and the only reason they’re not is that they’re many individuals instead of a collective voice.”

“Yep. And I should probably stop talking before I bore the audience to death again with my dissertation.”

“This is all very true, especially that last part about Ryan’s dissertation, but something has occurred to me,” Ashley said, shuffling some of her notes around.

“Yes?” Lizzy prompted.

“You didn’t answer my question. Who wrote _Little Girls in Pretty Boxes_?”

Lizzy buried her face in her hands and groaned.

* * *

* * *

_Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters_ was written by Joan Ryan. It was first published in 1995; a new edition came out last year, with a foreword by former Olympian Jamie Dantzscher.


	3. Chapter 3

Ella had been a bit depressed upon arriving in Europe and realizing there would be loads of gymnastics competitions going on around the continent but she wouldn’t be able to go to any of them, because they generally fell on days of World Cup games. Will and Lizzy were reluctant to ask one of her aunts to take her to another foreign country to attend a meet, whether it was Belarus, Hungary, or Italy. Taking one of the kids off for a few days was a lot different than minding them around Paris.

But Ella lucked out. Between the European Games and the Summer Universiade, her temporary Paris gym was hosting its annual meet. In recent years, they had taken to having some of the younger gymnasts at the club perform while the juniors and seniors transitioned from one apparatus to the next. Though Ella was only a guest there, she was asked to join.

Will thought she was doubly lucky that the meet fell on a day between quarter- and semi-finals in the World Cup. He had to admit that Ella’s training was making this trip more difficult than it might have been. It was definitely harder than Russia, although given they now had three children, it was impossible to tell how much gymnastics had contributed. Jane and Georgiana had proved themselves invaluable. He didn’t know how they could have managed without both of them.

One part of the meet was very familiar to Will. Just as in football, children escorted the athletes onto the podium (which was not, as he initially thought, a place for medalists to stand, but the elevated platform on which the athletes competed). Coach Garnier made it clear that the tipping point for asking Ella to participate was the amount of French she had learned over the last three weeks. There would be no translation at this meet, after all. She had to be able to understand the directions here.

As Will understood it, this meet was mostly junior elites, but it was a startling contrast with the last meet he’d been to. Vaults and tumbling passes were more complex, the beam and bar work more high-flying. Even Brendan was more interested than usual. “Whoa!” he said, as one gymnast swung around the high bar, let go to fly above it, and reached down between straddled legs to grab the bar again. “Can Ella do that?”

“Not yet,” Will said, wondering how Lizzy was going to react to that when Ella got to that point in her skills.

Her beam routine went off without a hitch, and barely even a wobble. The floor routine she did was sort of a group thing, with several of them doing tumbling passes to a song from _Moana_. Will wasn’t sure, but he thought Ella’s was the most complicated pass. Last of all she did bars, a routine which had gotten dramatically cleaner and rather more complex over the last three weeks. Evidently her stint at this gym had paid off.

At the end of the meet, Ella ran up to them, elated at how she’d done. “Did you see that?” she asked. “I finally nailed that tumbling pass!”

“You did great, honey,” Lizzy said.

“Yes, you did,” said an unfamiliar voice, his accent English.

Ella turned around as Will looked up. A man in a suit was standing a few feet back. “Uh, thank you,” Ella said, somewhat uncertainly. “Who are you?”

“I’m Jeremy Cardwell,” the stranger said, offering a handshake to Ella. “I’m from British Gymnastics. You must be Ella Darcy.”

“This was a meet for French clubs,” Will said, confused. “Why is someone from British Gymnastics here?”

“I’m the federation’s director of talent development for artistic gymnastics,” Cardwell replied. “I came here today to see young Miss Darcy.”

Something like dread washed over Will, followed by anger as he realized what was going on. He could manage only a single word.

“ _What_.”

* * *

Lizzy saw the moment Will’s brain short-circuited and knew she had to intervene before there was an international incident. “Hi, I’m Elizabeth Bennet-Darcy,” she said, passing Morgan to Georgiana. “I’m Ella’s mother. Could you step outside with me for a moment? Great, thank you.”

The man sputtered but came with her toward the exit. Once they were outside, she turned to him and said, “Forgive my bluntness, Mr. Cardwell, but have you lost your mind?”

“I beg your pardon!” he said indignantly.

“She is a _child_ ,” she said. “She is eight years old, and if I’m not mistaken you are trying to recruit her.”

“Yes, she is young,” he replied. “She is also a gifted athlete with dual citizenship.”

“And again, she’s eight!” Lizzy snapped. “How do you and your federation imagine that this is appropriate?”

“Are you familiar with the rules of international competition, ma’am?” Mr. Cardwell asked. “Artistic gymnastics is a sport of young athletes. The Oksana Chusovitinas of the world are vanishingly few. The choice your daughter has to make will be at her heels far faster than you imagine.”

Lizzy shook her head. “How did you even know about her? Or that she was here?”

“Do you think no one outside of America listens to The Flip Cast, or would recognize its hosts?” he asked. “You yourself mentioned that Miss Darcy was in the Americans’ fast-track program and was training in Paris. Ms. Hopkins and Mr. Cho were spotted here by people who subsequently tweeted about it. This was not exactly a case for Sherlock Holmes.”

Lizzy rubbed her temple for a moment, frustrated with herself for her misstep. She and Will were pretty cautious about sharing things about the kids. They were minor celebrities; their children were not. They talked about the kids on their show, but didn’t divulge details about them that might endanger them. Jeremy Cardwell and the British gymnastics federation weren’t exactly a danger, but it was a stupid mistake on her part.

When she said nothing, Cardwell reached into his ticket pocket. “I apologize for the intrusion,” he said. “I should have contacted you some other way. I wanted to assess your daughter’s skill and let you know that she has options with Team Great Britain. We have a strong program, very competitive here in Europe, and we have great hopes for the Tokyo games and beyond. From what I saw today, your daughter certainly has the talent to be a part of that. Will you at least take my card?”

Lizzy took the card but frowned at it. “You’re right, you should have contacted us some other way,” she said. “But thank you for the apology.”

Cardwell nodded curtly. “I’ll not take up any more of your time, ma’am. Enjoy your evening.”

He walked away, and Lizzy went back inside. Her family was waiting in the lobby, looking nervous. Ella blurted out, “Am I in trouble?”

Lizzy tucked the man’s card into her pocket and took Ella’s hand. “No, you’re not in trouble at all,” she said. “Let’s go get something to eat, all right?”

She looked over the kids’ heads at Will, who was holding himself stiffly, his expression blank. As they walked out of the gym, Lizzy sighed. This was going to be a fun evening.

Dinner was rough, though Brendan made a valiant effort to lighten the mood, mostly by sharing fun facts about the Ninja Turtles, or occasionally werewolves. Back at the hotel, Will went straight to the bedroom and shut the door. Lizzy told the kids to watch TV with their aunts and followed him.

“He was here to recruit her?” he asked when she’d shut the door again.

Lizzy nodded. “The federation found out about her and how to find her because of the interview I did,” she admitted. “That was careless of me.”

“Yes,” he replied, though without anger. He sat down on the bed, facing away from her. “What did he have to say? I’m sure you read him the riot act.”

“Something like that,” Lizzy said. Slowly she came up to the bed and sat beside him. “But he told me to look at the rules of eligibility and… he may have a point.”

Will looked at her sharply. “What do you mean?”

“Do you remember that story about the American gymnasts whose parents bought them spots on Belarus’s team?” she asked. “The FIG changed their rules to prevent people from doing that again. If you compete internationally for any country, you have to wait three years before you can compete for a different country.”

“I never imagined she might want to compete for the UK,” he said. “Why would she want to?”

“There’s less competition, but I don’t know if she’d want to for that reason. But she might also feel more needed there. I know there were times when I felt like a cog in the machine, especially as a goalkeeper. There were a lot more where I came from. I always felt replaceable, even with my record. And then when I got injured, there really was someone ready to replace me.”

“And USAG is going to be the same way,” Will mused. “Perhaps the British team would be less pressure for her. Might be safer for her in the long run as well.”

“Maybe.”

Will took her hand. “We’re agreed, though, that that was the worst possible way he could have approached us about this, right?”

Lizzy thought to make a joke, but it would have been in very poor taste. “Pretty much.” She leaned against his shoulder and said, “But we should explain all this to Ella, and you should make it clear that you aren’t angry at her. I think she worried about that all through dinner.”

He lifted her hand to kiss it. Then he said, “Oh, I have a gift for you.”

“Really? What for?”

Will went to his suitcase and pulled out a long jewelry box. “I’d say for the anniversary of our first kiss, but really, I wanted you to have them, particularly for the Fourth.”

Lizzy followed him and took the box eagerly. Inside were three slender tennis bracelets in white gold, each with a different stone. “I’d been intending to do this for a year. Finally found what I wanted last week,” he explained. “Rubies for Ella, diamonds for Brendan, and sapphires for Morgan.”

“They’re beautiful, Will. Thank you.” He put them on her wrist in succession, and Lizzy put her arms around him and kissed him, long and slow.

They were starting to get handsy when the door swung open abruptly. “Mom, Dad, I—can come back,” said Ella.

She was halfway out the door before Lizzy and Will separated. “Ella, wait,” Will said, while Lizzy suppressed the desire to giggle at the situation.

Ella stopped reluctantly. “Were you mad at me earlier?” she asked.

“Of course not,” he said.

“Are you mad at me now?”

“No. But your mum and I need to talk to you.”

Looking more than a little trepidatious, Ella came in and waited for them to speak.

* * *

Lyon was a day trip from Paris, one the Darcys would be making twice. It was only fitting that the semifinals and finals would be in Lyon, the beating heart of women’s football in France. But they probably wouldn’t have attended either semifinal in person, except that Lizzy had been asked to call the game which turned out to be the United States versus England.

They’d gotten a lot of ribbing about the coincidence as the quarterfinals ended. On air, Chuck Bingley jokingly wondered if the Darcy marriage would survive the second of July. Darcy shot back with his usual dry humor on Twitter, which was a mistake, as it gave the suits an idea.

“You should film a spot for us!” an excited woman from PR said. “I have just the thing. Let’s do face paint on both of you and—”

“No,” Darcy said emphatically, while Lizzy went into peals of laughter.

The PR woman was undeterred. “Your kids are here, right? How about we do something with—”

“No!” they both said, and Darcy added, “Absolutely not.”

They flummoxed the PR woman enough that she wound up bringing in reinforcements. It took a trio of them to come up with something that both Darcys would agree to. They brought in a tailor who fitted Will into a three-piece Burberry suit. Lizzy they dressed in her iconic look for big games: a USA jersey (this time in red), streamers in her pigtails, and the usual face paint.

The spot turned out rather charming, if he was honest. “Tune in Tuesday at three P. M. Eastern for the Women’s World Cup semifinal,” the announcer said. Lizzy appeared onscreen, arms crossed over herself and somehow looking imposing despite the streamers. “Team USA versus England!” At the last word, it cut to Will, in his suit, drinking a cup of tea (actually water) and casting a sidelong glance at his wife. The camera switched to a wide shot of both of them as a ton of red, white, and blue confetti dropped onto Lizzy. A bit of it landed on Will, and in a moment no one had scripted, he deliberately brushed it off his shoulder.

The ad went viral more or less immediately. Strangely it made Lizzy nervous. As they sat together on the train, she fiddled with her new bracelets until Will took her hand. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “You’ll be great, actually.”

“He’s right,” said Meg Gardiner in the seat across. “You’ve got Holly Ogden with you. She won’t let you fail at this.”

“I think I’m more nervous for this than for when I filmed with Will for the first time,” Lizzy admitted. “He was just a guy I thought was hot when I was a teenager.”

“Was?” Will repeated.

“Can we not have your ego as part of this conversation?” she asked.

Meg laughed at them a little. “Oh, I meant to ask, how did Ella’s meet go this weekend?”

Will stiffened and Lizzy sighed. “She did fine,” Lizzy said. “Well, even. But afterward we were approached by someone from British Gymnastics.”

Meg frowned. “Like, someone recruiting?”

“Yeah. We didn’t react well. He was apologetic, but we’ve started to realize he wasn’t entirely crazy,” Lizzy continued. “I mean, gymnasts commit verbally to universities when they’re still really young, and there are eligibility rules that mean she basically has to decide by the time she qualifies for elite.”

“Which is when?”

“Could be as early as eleven,” Will said. “Realistically, she probably has to make up her mind sooner than that.”

Meg nodded. “And she could alienate people in the US if she sticks around just long enough to qualify for elite and then saunters off to another country. The training program she’s in is an investment by the federation.”

“Exactly,” Will replied.

“So how did Ella take this?”

“It was a lot for her,” Lizzy said. “She knows she’s little. She also knows she’s good, but she’s spent all this time training around older gymnasts in the last few weeks and she knows how far behind them she is. I think she may feel flattered that the British federation is interested, but that’s a big weight to put on an eight-year-old.”

“Do you think she might want to go?” Meg asked.

Will shrugged. “She was too shell-shocked to have much of an opinion when we talked to her,” he said. “But whatever she decides, we’re probably going to wind up moving somewhere.”

“Yeah, a lot of the gyms where the top-tier American elites train are in Texas,” Lizzy said. “And there’s no way we’re sending her to board with someone to train at another gym.”

“So the question is, Texas or something more like home?” Meg said to Will.

“New York’s been home for a long time,” he said. “I’ll admit the thought of Texas doesn’t exactly thrill me. But ultimately we need to know what Ella wants before we can make a decision, and right now I don’t think she knows her own mind yet.”

* * *

In the stadium in Lyon, Lizzy met her announcing partner. Holly Ogden wasn’t a specialist in soccer commentary but had tremendous respect for the game, which showed in her work. When Lizzy shook her hand, she was holding a two-inch stack of notes in the other. “Such a pleasure meeting you,” Holly said. “You know, I called that match where you broke the record for most saves in a match. You were bloody brilliant.”

“Thanks,” Lizzy replied, smiling.

“Such a shame about that injury afterward,” Holly went on. “There were a lot of us who were really expecting to see you at another World Cup even after your surgery.”

Lizzy flexed her knee without thinking much of it. “Well, here I am at another World Cup.”

“True!” Holly said. “Well, let me introduce you to the production crew. And no need to be too nervous about it, all right? You and I are supporting each other, and we’ve got researchers putting information in front of us to keep the audience engaged. You’ll be great at this. I’ve an excellent sense for these things.”

Within the hour, the broadcast was starting, and the Paris studio handed over to Lyon. “Thanks, Ed, Chuck,” Holly said. “We’re here at the beautiful Parc Olympique Lyonnais with a capacity crowd, just shy of sixty thousand. I’m Holly Ogden, and I’m joined here today by a true legend in women’s football, former goalkeeper for the US squad and now cohost of CSTV’s _Off the Pitch_ , Elizabeth Bennet-Darcy.”

“It’s great to be here in Lyon,” Lizzy replied. There was no getting out of this now.

The US got sloppy about a minute in and lost possession. That was the moment Lizzy realized she was not emotionally ready to call an American game. Her heart was in her throat already.

It was a brilliant game, tense from the opening whistle to the last minute of stoppage time. The English women were prepared to face the Americans, certainly, and the latter were perhaps a bit keyed up at the beginning. “Megan Rapinoe, doubtless the star of the tournament, is on the bench for this game, and the team is maybe a little too keen to prove they’re not just Rapinoe plus ten,” Lizzy said a few minutes in.

“We’ve got a blistering pace already,” said Holly. “It really feels like they’ve been at this for twenty minutes and it’s only been five.”

“Well, the English bands help with that feeling,” Lizzy replied. “I’m pretty sure American high school football has bands because the game itself is interminable. Now they’re pushing forward, we’ve got some sloppy coverage from England there in the midfield, we’re down three quarters of the field in seconds. Cross to Christen Press—and header into the back of the net! Wonderful play by the Americans there.”

“England was late covering that, but Kelly O’Hara served up that cross beautifully,” Holly said. “And England is trailing for the first time in the tournament.”

“That’s the sixth time in this tournament that the US has scored in the first fifteen minutes as well. Lots of happy Americans in the stands now.”

The game calmed down over the course of the next several minutes. England was shaken but not deterred. In the nineteenth minute, Beth Meade fired the ball into the box and Ellen White tapped it into the net, tying the game and taking the lead for the Golden Boot. 

“The US can’t afford to let that happen again,” Lizzy said, her heart pounding once more. This was going to be a long game.

“Lizzy, you’ve been in this position before,” Holly said. “Both goalkeepers have given up goals early in this game. How do you keep it from getting to your head?”

“You’ve got to approach every play as its own game sometimes,” Lizzy replied. “Your goal is to defend the net. You can’t snatch a ball back out of it. You have to keep moving forward. What happened before won’t matter if you can’t stop the next one.”

“And speaking of the next one, brilliant save by Telford there for England but—oh, we’ve got Alex Morgan down on the field now. Looks like she collided with Bronze. The referee is coming over to see what’s happened.”

“Looks like she just needed a minute to recover from a hard hit,” Lizzy said. “Speaking of Alex, I do believe today’s her thirtieth birthday.”

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful for the team captain to lead them to victory on her birthday?” Holly asked. “You know, I heard a rumor you named one of your children after Alex Morgan.”

“It was a coincidence, but try telling people that.”

Play soon resumed. Possession went back and forth fairly often. The teams were well matched; England hadn’t just prepared to defend against the US but to attack. There were a couple near misses, including a moment that was very nearly an own goal, saved by the US goalkeeper.

Half an hour in, Lizzy said, “Press got great control over the ball there on a long pass, passes to Horan, who kicks it into the box. Morgan flies in through England’s defense, and it’s a header into the net! The US takes the lead again, and Alex Morgan takes the lead on the Golden Boot race, with six goals and three assists in the tournament.”

Two minutes later, Alyssa Naeher had blocked another English shot on goal. The Americans kept the pressure up too, tenacious in possession and relentlessly attacking. 

A yellow went up when Bright of England hit Morgan in the face while they contended for the ball. The following set piece came up empty for the US, but it broke England’s streak of no yellows for the tournament. 

At the half, Holly remarked, “The US have never lost when Alex Morgan has scored. What do you say to that?”

Lizzy took a deep breath. “It’s not over till it’s over.”

* * *

In the end, the score remained unchanged. A second goal by Ellen White was ruled offside by VAR, which had caused so much controversy during England’s victory over Cameroon. Will had not really believed going into the game that England could have beaten the Americans, but they put up a valiant fight until the last moment of a very long stoppage time. 

He said as much during the post-game with Lizzy, whose voice was a bit raspy. “I would be very remiss if I didn’t give England her due today,” he said. “They clearly believed they could win, and if it weren’t for a few inches, they might well have taken down the tournament favorite and defending champion.”

He tidied his notes and turned to Lizzy. “So how was your first experience calling a game live?”

“Yeah, I think I’d rather not call more Team USA games where there’s so much riding on it,” she replied. “I don’t think anyone expected me to be unbiased but they did expect me to be coherent.”

“You did seem to be holding it together with a wish and a prayer a couple times.”

“Only a couple? That’s better than I expected, then.” Lizzy looked back at the camera. “I’ve already tweeted this, but I just want to thank Holly Ogden again. She was an incredible partner for the game, and I can’t say enough good things about the production staff. They really work miracles in keeping the information flowing to the commentators so we can help you in the audience follow the action.”

“Oh, speaking of keeping the information flowing, did my sister send you that picture of the kids, or did she only send it to me?”

“I think she just sent it to you.”

Will had anticipated that and found a printer in the Lyon studio. He held up the image of their children. Ella and Brendan each had an American flag painted on one cheek and an English flag on the other. Morgan was on Ella’s lap, wearing a onesie which appeared to have been decorated by hand. Between the two flags on the onesie was written “A House Divided.” All three children were laughing.

“That is the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen,” Lizzy said earnestly.

“We can agree on that.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Legendary Goalkeeper Lizzy Bennet** @LizzyBennetGK: Can’t believe it’s been 7 months since our youngest was born! Morgan’s favorite activity now is grabbing her toes, which we assume is her way of telling us she wants to play soccer.

 **Will Darcy, jet lag edition** @DarcyStriker: FOOTBALL.

* * *

There was a fair bit of downtime for everyone after the semifinals were over. This was usually when the network came up with new and unusual ways to keep everyone busy and it ended with filming about thirty promo spots that might or might not be used at some nebulous point in the future. But this year’s pre-finals entertainment had a different flavor entirely.

CSTV had taken a deep financial hit two years ago when sexual harassment allegations against one of their most famous personalities surfaced. There was a mountain of evidence and the man was soon out the door, but he’d spent the previous six months filming segments for the Winter Olympics. CSTV spent millions of dollars to edit him out of all of their prerecorded material in the space of six weeks. Wary of repeating the 2018 experience, the head of Olympic coverage had decided to spread their coverage over many their sports personalities for 2020.

If the Women’s World Cup had been anywhere else, this meeting would have happened after the tournament, but the network suits probably never missed an excuse to go to Paris. Lizzy and Will were asked to come to the year-out meeting for the Tokyo Olympics, which was the first time that had ever happened.

Soccer wasn’t really the golden goose of the Olympics, though, so for Lizzy most of the meeting was a new experience. Even being a two-time Olympian herself didn’t prepare her for the scale of CSTV’s coverage. In the meeting, the head of Olympic coverage was handing out assignments for prerecorded interviews and stories. Lizzy and Will were handed a stack of players and coaches on the women’s side whom they were to cover.

If they’d just left it at that, the meeting would have ended without much happening of note. But then one of the suits got up to read a PowerPoint presentation on coverage guidelines to them. Martin Halloway got halfway through a slide entitled “Speaking to Viewers” when Will sighed heavily.

“Have you got something to add?” Martin asked.

All eyes turned to Will. Lizzy watched him make mental calculations, and she was a little surprised when he actually said what he was thinking. “Why are we dumbing things down for the audience?”

“I don’t believe we are, Mr. Darcy.”

“So the ‘Madeleine in Omaha’ rule isn’t telling us to dumb things down?” Will asked. “Are we giving her the oversimplified version because she’s a woman or because she’s from Nebraska?”

“What exactly are you insinuating?” one of the other executives said.

“That we’re doing a dramatic disservice to our audience and the athletes by presenting the Olympics without contextualizing any of it. I’ve learned a thousand times more about the technical aspects of gymnastics from my eight-year-old daughter than I ever have from a CSTV broadcast,” he said. “You’ve given _Off the Pitch_ carte blanche to cover football in as much depth as possible. Now our viewers who watch EPL games every week and argue about them on Twitter are well able to follow the conversation, but we get a lot of viewers for the World Cup who only watch during a World Cup. We don’t water it down that much for them. We try to help them understand what’s going on, because we want them to feel like they can follow the game.

“You’ve got an audience now with supercomputers in their pockets and the entire internet a moment away. They don’t understand something? They can look it up—and you’re a major broadcaster who can capitalize on putting those explanations on the internet.”

Until the end of Will’s rant, when he mentioned how this would make more money for the network, Lizzy thought her husband was about to be thrown out of the meeting, but there was a sudden shift at that moment. “All right, Mr. Darcy,” said Catherine de Bourgh, owner of the network, standing up from her seat at the head of the table, “tell us what you would do.”

Someone shut the projector off and turned the lights back on in the room, which made everyone blink a bit. Everyone except Will, anyway. He stared unflinchingly at Mrs. de Bourgh. “You have people interview experts, whether they’re athletes or coaches or, I don’t know, professors of sport mechanics or sport history. But I wouldn’t send interviewers who actually know much about the sport they’re covering. Have them ask questions they themselves have. Talk about why runners run that fast, where the decathlon came from, who thought steeplechase was a good idea. Maybe you have presenters learn how to do the basics themselves for some of the events. Assume that Madeleine in Omaha doesn’t want to be condescended to.”

A dead silence fell over the room, and for several tense moments, Lizzy wondered what it would be like if CSTV suddenly canceled _Off the Pitch_. But Mrs. de Bourgh surprised them all. “It’ll never work,” she said. “But you have three months to prove me wrong.”

“Me?” Will said, finally startled.

“Yes, it’s your lunatic idea. You get to execute it. Although I’d try to talk Elizabeth into cohosting if I were you.”

She forced the meeting back on track before further outbursts could ensue. When the meeting wrapped up, Lizzy and Will retreated to their studio. “Did I—did I really just do that?” he asked.

“Yes, you did,” Lizzy replied. “And I think Madeleine in Omaha will thank you when we’re done.”

* * *

The story of Will actually speaking in a meeting quickly spread around the CSTV studio. Chuck had the most annoying grin on his face when Will next saw him. “I’m not telling you what I was thinking,” he said as they both approached the dining room of the hotel the next morning.

“No, no,” Chuck replied. “I know what you were thinking. You were thinking what everyone who’s ever covered the Olympics was thinking. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but three months isn’t long to prove you’re right.”

They loaded up plates at the buffet as they talked. “Lizzy and I were up for a while last night, partly because Morgan has decided sleep is for the weak, but also talking over how we’re going to make this work. We’ve both got contacts in other sports, favors we can call in, and I think we can get a sizzle reel put together before the end of summer.”

“Well, let me know if you want me to call Caroline. She’s surprisingly good at explaining things, and you know she’s great on camera.”

“Thanks, I’ll let you know when we need her.”

They went to the large table where Lizzy was getting a sleepy Morgan into a high chair before getting her own food. Chuck had taken to eating breakfast with them so he could spend more time with Jane. That had probably endeared him to Jane in ways little else could, because eating with the Darcy kids could be an adventure.

Chuck and Jane had some news, though. He’d wanted to leave California for as long as Will had known him, and now he’d decided on Boston, to see if he and Jane would work out as a couple outside of Paris. Jane might have seemed overly calm about it to someone who didn’t know her, but Will could see the undercurrent of pleased nervousness. “That’s great,” he said to them. “I think you’ll like Boston a lot, Chuck. I know Jane does.”

“Yeah, and I should be able to see you guys a lot more now,” Chuck replied.

Lizzy and Will looked at each other, which Chuck saw. “What am I missing?” he asked. “You’re not moving, are you?”

Lizzy smiled wryly. “Ella’s attracted some interest from the British gymnastics federation,” she explained. “We don’t have to make a decision right away, but we haven’t said no yet.”

“Wow,” he said. Then he turned to Ella. “So are you going to defect like Nadia?”

He’d said the magic word, or maybe the cursed one. “I do _not_ want to be like Nadia Comaneci,” Ella shot back.

Will pinched the bridge of his nose. Chuck was floundering already. “But you’re a gymnast!” he said. “I thought all gymnasts wanted to be like Nadia. She was perfect!”

“She wasn’t perfect,” Ella said, cutting her Belgian waffle with a vengeance. “And Nellie Kim got two tens at the same Olympics, _and_ she performed harder optional routines than Nadia.”

“Oh,” Chuck said, by now thoroughly flummoxed. He looked at Jane and lowered his voice. “Who’s Nellie Kim?”

Fortunately Ella had her mouth full of waffles at that moment and Lizzy had aggressively steered the conversation to another subject by the time she swallowed.

When breakfast was over, Will wound up bringing up the rear with Ella, who looked up at him in some confusion. “Dad,” she said, “what does ‘defect’ mean?”

That caught Will unawares, though it likely shouldn’t have. “It means leaving one country to support another, generally an enemy country. Chuck was teasing you.”

“Oh.” She was quiet for a minute. “Did anyone other than Nadia defect?”

“Yeah, loads of people have defected, especially from the Soviet Union, before it collapsed,” Will replied. “I know you like their gymnasts, but the USSR wasn’t a very good place to live for a lot of people.”

He wondered how much more of the Cold War he was going to have to whittle down to an eight-year-old’s comprehension, but in the end, she just said, “Oh.”

* * *

The morning before the third-place game, Jane went with Lizzy to Ella’s last practice in France. She’d work out for a couple hours and then say goodbye to the friends she’d made there. There were marked changes from the first practice Lizzy had observed. Ella had refined her form on beam and bars, as well as the dance elements of floor. Her coach also spoke to her more in French than in English, and Ella could often respond in kind.

“She’s a hard worker,” Coach Garnier said to Lizzy and Jane while Ella warmed up. “She has talent, of course, but talent alone won’t make a champion. I understand someone from British Gymnastics spoke to you.”

It was still a bit of a sore spot, but Lizzy nodded. “I still wish he’d found some other way to approach us, but the truth is that my husband and I aren’t used to how early kids are recruited in gymnastics, even though he went through the youth system in England for soccer,” she said. “There are twelve-year-old gymnasts making verbal commitments to colleges back in the States. I suppose the British weren’t totally out of line for making the approach now.”

“For what it is worth, I think she could do very well in European competition,” Garnier said. “And she and the British program could benefit each other.”

“Thank you,” Lizzy replied. “You’ve been a big benefit for her in the last month too.”

The coach smiled.

When she’d gone back to get Ella onto a low beam, Jane said, “You know, I have a patient who’s a gymnast.”

“Are you about to tell me a horror story?”

“No. Well, not exactly. This patient is thirteen and she’s already had surgery on her elbow, but I’m sure you’ve heard of worse.”

“Yeah. Ella’s had some close calls,” Lizzy admitted. “But she’s learning the difference between sore and painful, which is good, I think.”

“It is,” Jane replied. “My point is really about how it’s changed her life. She’s homeschooled now so she can spend more time in the gym. Her parents are thinking about moving to Texas, or sending her if they can’t move the whole family.”

“I know,” Lizzy said. “There are plenty of times that I think this is crazy, why are we doing this? And all this week I’ve been wondering why we’re even entertaining the notion of moving to another country for gymnastics. But then I remember that Mom and Dad sacrificed a lot for us too. I mean, Mom quit her job to take care of me after my injury, and I was already an adult then. They may not have been perfect parents, but they made sure we had opportunities. Now Ella’s got this opportunity, and if she decides she wants to, it’s hard to say no.”

“Has she given you any indication?”

Lizzy shook her head. “I’m waiting for her to bring it up. There’s not a rush, but I do wish I knew what she’s thinking.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve talked to those podcast friends of yours?”

“I talked to Ashley. She said the British program is really healthy in a lot of senses, and she wasn’t surprised that they’d come calling.”

“Does that make you feel better?”

“A little.”

Across the way, Ella moved to a high beam. She was evidently going to practice a whole routine, because she started by saluting the imaginary judges. But instead of the one-armed salute which Lizzy had seen so often, she raised her left arm high and brought her right to shoulder-height, palms turned but not fully upward. “Is that…” Jane began.

“Megan Rapinoe,” Lizzy said, laughing in delight. “She’s saluting like Megan Rapinoe.”

* * *

For the final, the whole Darcy clan went to Lyon. Lizzy was grateful for high-speed rail, as Morgan slept the whole way and Brendan watched an animated Spider-Man movie. Ella, once she understood how fast the train would travel, wanted to do handstands in the aisle so she could say she’d done handstands at two hundred miles an hour. Fortunately Will put a stop to that before she tried.

“Never say never,” Lizzy had said during the preview show she and Will recorded the day before. “Yes, the Americans are in phenomenal form, but it’s not like the Netherlands have been slouches in this tournament.”

“No, they’ve acquitted themselves well this time,” Will had replied. “This is only their second time qualifying for the World Cup and they’ve made it to the final. Win or lose today, I’m excited to see what they do next year in the Olympics.”

“Exactly, don’t count them out. It’s been a brilliant tournament, in large part because women’s soccer has gotten so much stronger outside of the US. The progress has been incredible over the last twenty-odd years.”

“Couldn’t agree more.”

Lizzy was nervous, though, as they entered the stadium, and her nerves didn’t abate until the sixty-first minute, when Alex Morgan took a cleat to the side and the US was awarded a penalty by VAR. Megan Rapinoe took the penalty kick and shot it past the Dutch goalkeeper, and Lizzy screamed as loudly as she ever had on the pitch.

Under ten minutes later, Rose Lavelle danced around defenders to score again. Twenty minutes remained, but that goal would seal the game. At the end of five minutes of stoppage time, the United States women’s national team had defended its World Cup title. It was something Lizzy had never experienced for herself, and she found herself with a lump in her throat as she watched the celebrations begin.

As the trophies came out, the chants of “USA!” changed. The Darcys were seated just behind the section for players’ families, and around them came a deafening cry: “ _Equal pay! Equal pay!_ ”

Lizzy hefted Morgan higher on her hip as she burst into tears. She hadn’t expected to find this victory so emotional. But the support of the American fans around her was enough. They weren’t just cheering on the team’s athletic achievements. They were cheering for them to get the respect they deserved from their federation and from FIFA.

“Mom?” Ella said, alarmed. “Why are you crying?”

Lizzy just pulled her in, holding both her girls as tightly as she could. “You’ll understand someday,” she said. “I promise you will.”

* * *

The cameras found them in the stands more than once, of course. Lizzy had painted every face but Will’s with American flags, and of course every fan of US women’s soccer recognized her with or without the Stars and Stripes on her cheeks. Two moments went viral: her screaming at Rapinoe’s penalty kick, and her crying with her daughters in her arms.

They filmed _Off the Pitch_ in their hotel room that night, after returning to Paris. Lizzy had Morgan in a wrap sling through the whole thing, trying to get her to sleep. It resulted in some oddly singsong analysis at times.

“Hey, look, babe,” Will said, as he scrolled through Twitter to find one particular tweet. “You’re internet famous.”

“I’ve been internet famous for years,” she replied, though talking to the baby.

“Yes, but listen to this—‘Let this be as iconic of any of Lizzy Bennet’s time on the pitch. Let this support translate into action’—all caps, that—‘Let her daughters grow into women who never have to ask why they are paid less than men.’”

“Aww,” Lizzy said, leaning over to look at Will’s phone, “thank you, Mr. Moleman411. And I agree. Let’s make this happen, folks. Write and call your representatives or whoever it is in your form of government who makes these decisions. Let’s make it clear that soccer fans demand equality across the board.”

Will grumbled, thinking he was inaudible, but Lizzy heard him. “What was that, honey?” she asked.

“Football,” he said. “Football.”

Lizzy rolled her eyes and gave the camera a tired grin.

* * *

Everyone slept on the plane home, including Jane, whom Will had bumped to first class. They had a couple days of rough adjustment to get used to being home again. They weren’t quite as on top of each other as they had been in Paris, but it seemed like all the edges were sharper until the jet lag wore off and they were back on New York time.

Three days after their return, Lizzy and Will had to go to a meeting at CSTV headquarters, meaning they’d left the kids with their neighbor Mrs. Reynolds for the afternoon. They came back to their apartment with stacks of paper on previous Olympic coverage and a determination to figure out how they were going to manage their new production idea.

Will went to the study to call Chuck, hoping to get Caroline Bingley to agree to help out with a test segment on tennis. Lizzy camped out on the couch with the Olympics documents on the coffee table, and she was still there when she heard a door open from the direction of the kids’ bedrooms.

When Ella reached the living room, she was in her pajamas—shorts and a T-shirt that said “Always be yourself! Unless you can be Aliya Mustafina, then always be Aliya Mustafina”—when she came into the living room, looking troubled. “Ella?” Lizzy said. “Did you have a bad dream?” It was a little early for Ella to have been asleep already.

Ella shook her head. “Mom, can we talk about—about the British?”

Lizzy set the papers aside. “You sure you don’t want to talk to Dad about this?”

Again, Ella shook her head. “No, I need to talk to you.”

Lizzy got up and steered her into the kitchen, where she got out a half-empty pint of ice cream and two spoons. They sat together on barstools, and Lizzy waited for her daughter to start. After a couple spoonfuls, Ella sighed. “Will it make me a bad American if I compete for the British?”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Lizzy said, “no. You’re just as much British as you are American. Choosing one half doesn’t make you bad at the other half.”

“I wish I didn’t have to choose.”

Lizzy kissed the top of her head. “I know. It was easy for me because I didn’t have to choose. But a lot of this—I think you’re going to learn earlier than most people that nationality is just an accident. You have an American mom and a British dad, so you’re both. You didn’t choose either of them. It’s just who you are.” She brushed back Ella’s hair. “Is this how you’re telling me that you want to move to England?”

“I don’t know,” Ella replied. “People are going to say I took the easy way if I go.”

“Well, people who say that will be wrong. It may be easier, but it still won’t be easy. It’s harder to make the Olympics in gymnastics than to make it to the NFL. It’s not like the British have no program. Their program just isn’t as big. But it depends on what you want.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you know why American women have been so dominant in sports like soccer and gymnastics?”

Ella frowned. “Why?”

“Some of it is that we have a bigger population than most countries and have more athletes to choose from,” Lizzy explained, “but it’s also because of something called Title IX.”

“That’s a weird name.”

Lizzy laughed a little. “It is. It means it’s the ninth section of an education law. But Title IX says that schools that get money from the federal government can’t discriminate between boys and girls. Or men and women, when you’re talking about college. Colleges give a lot of scholarships for men to come play football or baseball or whatever. Title IX means they have to give the same number of scholarships to female athletes as they give to male athletes. One of the ways this panned out is that NCAA women’s soccer and gymnastics got to be really competitive for girls wanting college scholarships. Including me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I didn’t play soccer to be in the Olympics. I played to pay for college,” Lizzy explained. “Most girls who are in soccer or gymnastics are looking to get scholarships, not to get on a podium. So if you just want to have fun competing now and compete in college, then I don’t think there’s a reason to get all worked up about nationality. If you want to compete in Worlds or the Olympics, then we have decisions to make.”

Ella said nothing, and Lizzy followed suit, knowing the look on her little girl’s face. She was more used to seeing it on Will’s. Ella was thinking hard, and answers weren’t coming easily.

When the ice cream was done, Ella took the spoons to the sink and threw away the empty carton. “Can I see your medals?”

Lizzy went to the hall closet and got the shoebox down from the shelf. It was heavy, and the box probably needed to be replaced. Inside it were the mementos of her career, other than the Golden Glove from her own World Cup, too big to fit in the box. At the bottom were her medals, a pair of them in gold.

She set them out in front of Ella, who picked up the Beijing medal. It looked so large in her hands. She ran her fingers over the jade inset. “Mom, why do you keep these in the closet?”

Lizzy sighed. “I was really young when I won these,” she said. “I think when you’re that successful at that age, it’s easy to look back at that as your biggest achievement, or start to wonder if you’ll ever be successful again. And for a while… For a while it hurt to look at them.”

“Why?”

“You know I got hurt, right?” Lizzy asked. When Ella nodded, she continued, “I tore some cartilage when I hyperextended my knee. That means it wasn’t bent the right way.” Ella cringed, and Lizzy reached to smooth her hair and comfort her a little. “We were playing Japan. It was a tough game; we barely eked out a win, and the last time we’d played them, they beat us. There was a lot of traffic in front of the net almost at the end of stoppage time. One of their forwards got a touch on the ball. I went sliding for it, and I managed to knock it away, but I slid into someone after I got the ball and my knee just…”

She didn’t need to describe it more. Ella looked faintly green. “It doesn’t still hurt, does it?”

Lizzy shook her head. “Only a little when it rains.” She set her arm around her daughter and pulled her close. “I knew when they were carrying me off the field that I was never going to play for my country again. Even if surgery made my knee as good as new again, there were more goalkeepers waiting for a turn. It was Team USA. Part of our strength as a squad was that there was more where where I came from. I’d been hoping for another Olympics, another World Cup, and I wasn’t going to get it. So I put the medals in a box, because sometimes even good memories hurt.

“We don’t always get choices as athletes. I don’t mean to scare you, but you’re in a sport that sometimes chews up its best athletes before they get a chance to peak. Careers don’t always end the way we plan. Which is not to say that you shouldn’t have a plan, but you need to keep in mind that things change. Sometimes you have to move on and find new things that you’re passionate about.”

For a minute Ella chewed her lip, thinking hard. “I wish you’d hang these up somewhere,” she eventually said.

Lizzy picked up the other medal. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. You’re always telling me to be proud of myself when I do well. I think you should be proud that you did well, even if it didn’t end the way you wanted.”

Lizzy thought of all the criticism women had faced in the last month, being expected to apologize for doing well. For her children’s sake, Ella was probably right. They needed to live in a home where their mother’s achievements were celebrated. And seeing them now brought back the past without bringing back the pain.

Ella carefully put the medals back in the box. “Mom, I want to be an Olympian. Like you.”

Lizzy took her daughter’s hand. “Then we have some decisions to make about what we do going forward. But we don’t have to make them now. We have a little time to think about it and talk about it. And maybe before school starts again, we go visit Dad’s family and a British gym.”

Ella suddenly threw her arms around Lizzy. “Thanks, Mom.”

“You’re welcome, honey.” Lizzy pulled back and added, “I just want you to know, whatever country you compete for, I will be there to embarrass you.”

Ella laughed a little. “Gee, thanks.”

“Off to bed, okay? You’ve got workout in the morning.”

Ella headed to her bedroom, and Lizzy picked up one of the medals again. Will found her like that when he came out of the study. “Caroline Bingley is good to go,” he said. “You reliving your glory days?”

Lizzy laughed a little. “No, Ella wanted to see them.”

That stopped him in his tracks. “Did you talk about…”

“Yes,” she replied. “She hasn’t made a decision about countries, but she wants to shoot for the Olympics.”

Will came and sat beside her, blowing out a long breath. “Well, good for her, I suppose. I’ll email Coach Garnier, see if she recommends any coaches to talk to in England. We probably ought to pay a visit before the summer’s out if she’s really going to consider moving.”

“That’s what I told her.” Lizzy set the medal down and added, “She also thinks I should hang these up somewhere.”

“You should,” he said. “Although I’ll admit, I’ve always found it terribly charming that you stuff Olympic medals in a shoebox.”

“Well, as Nadia Comaneci—”

“You mean Ella’s nemesis.”

“As Ella’s nemesis said, ‘I know I won them,’” Lizzy finished. “But Ella’s right. I should be proud of them. The kids should know I’m proud of them.”

“I agree,” he said quietly.

Lizzy leaned into him, and he set his arm around her shoulders. “Those weren’t my glory days, by the way.”

“No?”

She turned to kiss him softly. “Nope. Don’t get me wrong, they were great days. I wouldn’t trade them for anything. But I wouldn’t trade these days with you and the kids for anything either.”

He smiled wryly. “I hope you still feel that way after the Olympics, darling.”


End file.
